Bring U.S. closer to a real democracy

President Barack Obama formally opened his 2012 campaign last week. Regardless of whom you’d like to see take the oath of office on Inauguration Day, 2013, we can all agree that it should be the candidate Americans actually elect.

Yet election rules now make it possible that the loser will win the presidency, because almost every state awards all its electoral votes to the candidate who wins the popular vote there. And given how electors are allocated, a candidate can collect a majority of electors, without a majority of the votes nationally.

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These problems can be avoided, however, simply by changing the way that states allocate their electoral votes: States would agree to award their electoral votes to the candidate who wins the nation’s popular vote, not the state’s. So voters in every state would then become important to the final count.

This proposal, called the National Popular Vote plan, already has broad bipartisan support. But it could gain momentum if the public was allowed to vote on it – which the Constitution allows.

Consider, in 2000, George W. Bush, by securing Florida and its 25 electoral votes, won the election — though his opponent, Al Gore, won the popular vote by more than a half-million votes.

Then-President Bush nearly got his own back four years later, however. Though he won the popular vote by more than three million votes, a shift of as few as 60,000 in Ohio would have given the election to Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.).

Neither election was an anomaly. Indeed, the 2000 election was the fourth in U.S. history where the winner of the popular vote did not gain the White House. Elections that aren’t landslides regularly result in the serious possibility that a candidate will be “elected” despite being second in the overall vote.

There have been various efforts to force the states to adopt some other rule – for example, amending the Constitution to abolish the Electoral College. But the problem is not the Electoral College. It is the choice that most states are making in allocating their electors. The culprit? The state “winner-take-all” state system used by 48 of the 50 states.

These rules also have pernicious side effects. Candidates’ time and money are focused largely on the small number of battleground states. This discourages those in the remaining majority of states from feeling that their votes matter, depressing turnout for down-ballot races and issues.

The National Popular Vote bill can ensure every vote counts – not just in swing states. It preserves the Electoral College, while guaranteeing that the candidate who receives the most votes in the 50 states and the District of Columbia becomes the president.

The plan calls for the states to pass a law that would award all their electoral votes to the candidate who wins the national popular vote. To ensure each state that the others won’t cheat, the bill enacts an Interstate Compact, binding all that subscribe.

The plan would go into effect — and states would assign their votes to the national popular vote winner — when the states adopting the law add up to at least 270 electoral votes, enough to elect a president. That way, hold-out states won’t affect computing the binding national tally, because all the nation’s voters’ ballots will still be counted by the states in the compact.